The fulfillment of the law: Contestation in postwar thought and fiction.

摘要

This dissertation traces how a specific trope drawn from Pauline theology has been used to account for a structural transformation of the place of ethics in politics that becomes particularly evident in the latter half of the twentieth century. The “fulfillment of the law,” which is Saint Paul's condensed formula articulating the relationship between his messianism and the Judaic tradition, is itself the basis for a tradition of grounding the legitimacy of juridico-political authority in its contestation.;Although the act of contestation has been assigned a delimited role within specific political systems, I argue that its fundamental and infinite task is to mark the lapsus of the state, the way in which the state constitutively forgets or represses the principle of its own laws. Precisely because no law is actually founded upon principles, but is rather unfounded upon an act of violent positing, the simple fact that there is any relation between the existence of laws and the principle of law depends essentially upon the accident of an initial contestation.;The first chapter holds that Paul's letters are relevant to modernity for the way in which they read the address of the Judaic tradition. Rather than naming the election of a historical people, Paul demonstrates that the address of the commandment is the form in which tradition inscribes the empty place of contestation into the law itself.;The second and third chapters examine how the political writings of Jean Genet and Georges Bataille seek to redefine contestation in response to the extreme situation of modern technological wars where state action does not only repress the principle of law, but actively destroys it. Each writer explores the possibility that the literary staging of an open address might itself bear witness to a political space beyond the public sphere and thus lend a certain consistency to the vanishing importance of the contestatory act.;Reading Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho in the context of such concerns, the final chapter shows how this work stages the predicament of a language enjoined to adjudicate (to say “the worst”) beyond access to any principle of authority.